Category: Digital Culture

Why is Singapore a Hub of Online Piracy?

Historically, one thinks of piracy and Singapore in the context of the high seas — both in legend and in reality.  Geography shapes history, and the the Malacca Strait has always been a valuable sea line of communication, thus good hunting ground for centuries of armed robbers right up to the present.  And although the various regimes in Singapore have a long history of dealing with piracy in the traditional sense, the current government appears to have a new problem on its hands with piracy in the online media sense.  The small, relatively affluent city-state of 5.5 million people ranks the worst out of 15 Asia-Pacific countries in per capita infringement according to research by MarkMonitor, a division of Thompson-Reuters.  Additionally, a handful of articles appeared recently citing research done by Asia-Pacific firms Sycamore and InsightAsia indicating that 70% of 16-24 year-olds are chronic users of pirate sites. This is consistent with the study released last September by London-based NetNames, demonstrating that Asia leads Europe and the U.S. for explicit use of pirate sites, with those three regions accounting for over 90% of of pirate traffic worldwide.  In my podcast interview with the author of that study, Dr. David Price did affirm that wider availability of legal, broadband-based services likely accounts for the U.S. being in third place, but his study also shows that pirate traffic continued to increase in all three regions concurrent with the expansion of legal alternatives.

The Sycamore/InsightAsia study also provides some interesting data regarding Singaporean attitudes toward piracy, revealing a willingness among those polled to examine their own behaviors — an awareness we don’t always see in the American market — that reminds one to try to understand each culture and market on its own terms rather than view data through our provincial lenses.  66% of those polled believe that their own use of pirate sites is form of theft, and 85% responded that the reason they access media through pirate sites is “Because it’s free.”  Other responses suggest an interesting contrast to many Americans’ more militant attitudes that media piracy represents some sort of civil right, despite the fact that Americans have affordable access to everything.  Singaporeans, who have have far less ready access to media, seemed to respond to the hypothetical loss of pirate sites with something of a shrug.  Those polled tended to say that if XYZ site were gone or blocked, that they’d probably move to the next, cheapest alternative.  The fact that Singaporeans didn’t raise ideological objections might partly be explained by the fact that civil rights in Singapore are not what they are in the United States, but I think there are more shades of gray here that actually make Singapore an interesting case study to watch.

I did some work-for-hire filming in Singapore in 2007, and I chatted with my friend over there who works in filmed entertainment production about some of these issues.  Granted, it’s one woman’s view from the ground, but I found her comments insightful.  For one thing, it seems we can understand the Singapore market in three broad demographics that each consume media very differently, keeping in mind that nearly 75% of the population is ethnic Chinese, descendant of immigrants who came to work for the colonial British.  The official language of Singapore is English, and school is modeled on a British system, although native English speaking is a post-independence (1963) phenomenon, which is why many people over 60, like my friend’s father, speak only Chinese and generally watch Chinese television programs.

At the other end of the market are those teens to early twenties, who are voracious users of pirate sites and are presently most interested in music and filmed entertainment coming out of Japan and Korea.  This demographic represents the hungriest consumers of media in Singapore for the same reason it does everywhere else — the young have more free time.  While iTunes is available in Singapore, broadband services akin to Netflix for filmed entertainment are not legally available, making DVD purchase the primary legal means to watch films and programs on demand.  Youth being youth, they want to consume high volumes at a high rate and feel they can’t afford enough DVD consumption.

In the middle demographic (late 20s to about 60), we find people with jobs and responsibilities and who have a broad range of media tastes, including US and UK productions.  This group buys CDs and DVDs, but they will also use pirate sites to sample programming before purchase. From this anecdotal evidence, we can predict the technorati to assert that Singapore’s piracy problem is one Neflix-type enterprise away from a solution, and while this would probably have a mitigating effect, it’s not necessarily as simple as that.

For one thing, delivering a rich library of on-demand, digital video into a particular country is complicated by trade arrangements between the producing and consuming nations, licensing agreements written into contracts before films and TV shows are even produced, and the socio-political nature of the consuming nation. With Singapore’s present piracy numbers, investors would likely write off the market as a legitimate importer/exporter of entertainment media.  This is one of the obstacles tech-utopians tend to overlook in every market when they write oversimple editorials about “switching models” to technological solutions, as though installing an app is all that’s required.  In order for their to be actual trade involved, someone has to invest considerable resources to navigate the financial, legal, and cultural seas, as it were; but if the piracy numbers are too high, that’s what will prevent a quality, Netflix-like model from manifesting in a market like Singapore.

Moreover, Singapore’s piracy trend risks cannibalizing their own burgeoning filmed-entertainment industry.  For a small nation, they produce an impressive amount of cinema and television programming out of a couple of fairly big studios and several modest production houses. It has also recently become home to satellite facilities for some major animation and effects studios like Lucasfilm and Double Negative. With the growth of this industry, it is not unreasonable to think that some of today’s teenage K-Pop fans are going to want to be tomorrow’s film and TV producers; and a message that says “Don’t pirate away your own future” may actually resonate with young Singaporeans.

It would be a shame if investors did abandon the region as a legitimate market, particularly because Singapore could become a pivotal location for media production and commerce in Asia-Pacific, just as it is a financial services hub and presides over one of the busiest shipping ports in the world.  Additionally, I think it might be interesting to watch how those 16-24 year-olds emerge as a creative class, considering they’re still part of the first generation of natives born to an independent Singapore.  Thus, they are at the early stages of defining what it means to be Singaporean, which might explain why my friend describes a love/hate relationship with China.  As that culture evolves, it will be reflected in the films and TV Singaporeans will produce, thus opening the proverbial sea lines of communication for fair trade in media will be essential to foster that expression in a manner that’s sustainable.

Social Media Shorthand

This is a theme I’ve certainly written about before; it is in fact, the theme that started this blog — the idea that the expansion of stuff through communications technology can lead to a reduction in the very benefits meant to be yielded by the expansion in the first place.  CNN’s insistence upon providing round-the-clock speculation about the missing Malaysian airliner is just the latest absurd example demonstrating how 24hr news can yield less actual reporting than the years when TV news was limited to just a few hours a day.  This, perhaps counterintuitive, more-is-less phenomenon is not only replicated in the realm of social media, it appears to be exacerbated by the tools themselves, which promise deeper immersion into stuff, but wind up fostering exactly the opposite behavior.  And according to this New York Times editorial about online slang by novelist Teddy Wayne, the shorthand we often use online doesn’t necessarily help.  From the article:

“It takes far more time and energy to express a nuanced reaction to a personal essay than simply writing “Heart” or “Oh, please.” Likewise, when a celebrity does something we disagree with, it is easier to condemn him with a one-word takedown than to empathize with his humanity and communicate a more complex reflection. If you physically handed an article to a friend, or even emailed it, it’s doubtful you would sum it up with one reductive word. But when disseminating it to the masses, we often dumb down our own interpretations.”

I don’t think Wayne means to suggest these monosyllabic habits are a purposeful dumbing down the way a TV executive might want to make a script less literate in order to retain marketshare.  Instead, these slangy fragments, even used by highly educated adults, are just an inevitable by-product of the technologies and interfaces themselves.  The volume and rate at which things go by while we’re probably meant to be doing something else combined with the fact that we may be typing with a single thumb on smart phone is all going to produce concision just this side of a grunt.  What interests me, though, is whether or not these fragmentary exchanges are more than a byproduct and are instead something akin to a force, like the dark matter of the universe causing both expansion and acceleration toward a greater “emptiness.”  A friend or colleague’s endorsement (i.e. share) is a powerful validation; so, if a friend shares a story along with  the note “Terrible” or “Amazing!” or some other context-free comment, does this further increase the probability of one taking a headline and a picture at face value and passing it along with one’s own cursory remark?

Just last week, a well-educated, well-meaning friend on Facebook posted an article about a new, admittedly concerning, bill in Tennessee.  The article was hosted on a website that deals with LGBT issues.  It featured a stock photo of two young men grappling and one of them clearly about to get his face pounded.  The headline stated that the new bill would effectively permit bullying of gay students in public schools as a form of religious expression.  Is it outside the scope of some people’s beliefs?  Not at all.  Is it the kind of thing we might expect to come from certain regions of this country?  Sure.  Do the headline and and photo accurately reflect the language in the bill?  Not quite.  The bill itself certainly should be of concern to those of us who believe the separation of church and state is unambiguous, but there’s nothing I can read in its text that can justifiably be called state-sanctioned bullying of anyone in particular.

Not to get bogged down in that bill per se, the point is that I suspect we all propagate shorthand engagement with social issues from time to time, pushing semi-accurate stories along with a verbal pat on the back or slap on the wrist.  What’s interesting, though, about this Tennessee bill example is that the lead is one of those that can immediately send one into a rage about a matter entirely different from the more subtle and insidious concern that the story actually raises.  On first encounter with the keyhole view of this story on Facebook, a whole movie narrative unfolds in the mind with hicks beating up gay kids while school officials quietly thank God in the background. Meanwhile, as we share, vent a moment of outrage, and move on, we risk missing the subtle story in which the Tennessee state legislature is moving the needle between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause toward favoring more religious influence in public schools. As Wayne writes, “Indeed, fragments are indicative of how quickly we pass judgment while on the Internet without investigating an issue too deeply. We share articles and videos that conform to our prejudices but rarely seek out opposing views, and hardly ever link to them unless it’s to mock them.”

My photographer friend calls all this “gisting.”  My journalist friend calls the internet the greatest tool for “epistemic closure,” describing its efficacy in providing endless support of one’s pre-existing biases.  Whatever we want to call these superficial interactions with information, with news, even with one another, it seems as though the solution is a conscious choice to force behaviors contrary to the instincts fostered by the technologies.   Or…whatevs.

Coup du Jour – Eric Schmidt as CEO of America?

Image by RienkPost

In case you missed it, OWS co-founder, now Google software engineer, Justine Tunney is responsible for a petition calling for a coup d’etat that would hand over administrative authority of the United States to the tech industry and appoint Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.  Whether Tunney is trying to be amusing, or she’s deranged, or she’s just another Twitter attention junkie, nobody is taking her too seriously if the comment section below the article in The Guardian is any indication.  In fact, this is one of those side-show moments that I questioned commenting on at all except for the unfortunate fact that so much of what now passes for discourse in the world  comprises so many side shows that mutate into headlines and round-table discussions on once-respectable news programs.  Even more relevant, though, is that even if Tunney herself is dismissible, her appeal might actually touch a few very real nerves running though the body of the American electorate.

For starters, the suggestion that any business leader ought to be president, that the presidency itself is like being a CEO, is a well-entrenched conservative idea also popular with many right-leaning libertarians.  Given that one of the universal complaints about government is that the elected are terrible stewards of “our money,” it’s a natural, albeit narrow-minded, instinct to want to elevate a successful business operator to the presidency so that he or she can “get our house in order.” On purely theoretical grounds, I have always quarreled with this premise because a corporation is not a democracy — I don’t care how flat you say your org chart is — so much as it is a benign dictatorship, usually designed to excel in a limited number of core competencies in the service of profitability.  Democracy isn’t efficient, giving everyone a voice isn’t efficient, balancing competing interests within a nation isn’t efficient; but inefficiency is one of the prices we pay for free speech, the right to redress the government, the right to assemble and organize, and so on.

Conversely, CEOs are conditioned toward efficiency and toward meeting quarterly goals for their shareholders.  As such, CEOs are not necessarily the best collaborators; they’re often not multi-dimensional thinkers; they frequently have egos way too big for Washington (which is saying something); and they’re not particularly oriented toward balancing the needs of the diverse and quarrelsome many. There are and have been CEOs who meet these criteria, but my point is that a strong P&L statement alone does not make a good resume for Leader of the Free World.  Interestingly though, while Tunney is standing on this weatherbeaten plank of the GOP, I think she’s simultaneously echoing sentiments among the left and libertarian left, who have come to think of technologies like social media as the antidote to corporate/government corruption and incompetence.  And this is where the bizarre confluence of Occupy zeal and the idea of appointing a less-than-one-percenter like Eric Schmidt as national leader might actually make some twisted sense in certain minds.

Occupy, after all, was a YouTube protest that was unfortunately almost as fleeting as that damn “What Does the Fox Say” video, and just about as likely to effect any tangible change in the world. At its core, I thought OWS began as a legitimate response to a genuine problem — wealth consolidation and the many systemic ways in which this economic cancer, eating away the middle class, is protected and perpetuated in the U.S.   But Occupy rather quickly manifest as the proverbial rebel without a clue — yet another social media side show in which the lead stories became a handful of viral videos depicting excessive force by certain police officers instead of a narrative relating any kind of clear, advancing agenda.  Thanks in part to the ephemeral nature of social media and its tendency to provoke an increase in conspiracy theory, the story of Occupy became the story of who was trying to shut it down rather than what it was meant to accomplish. Think OWS today, let alone years from now, and what probably remains are a few images of cops misusing pepper spray.  Imagine if all you could say about the civil rights movement is that some cops sprayed people with fire hoses.

Like it or not — and I certainly don’t — the Tea Party made Occupiers look like a bunch of fair-weather activists who seemed to think it was enough to conjure the illusion of a movement with all the trappings and also seemed to confuse mouse clicks with votes.  OWS generated images and buzz and “Likes” and a moment of fleeting outrage while the Tea Party got seats in the House of Representatives.  So, while Justine Tunney may be mockable for her hypocrisy, trying to trade on OWS bona fides from the rarefied heights of Googletopia and anointing the most corporate of corporate guys, the irony is that an event like OWS unwittingly does feed the pseudo-progressive trend toward a technocracy.  OWS was a functionally impotent movement with regard to addressing any serious issues, but one that simultaneously elevated the apparent relevance of citizens using smartphones and social media. By extension, this elevates the importance of the individuals who build those technologies.

In this sense occupy takes on an unintended second meaning.  While it was meant to express a contemporary sit-in whereby people occupy physical space as a form of protest, the millions of people passively engaged online were occupied in the sense that their attention was drawn particularly toward the aforementioned images of police misconduct.  While this is happening, the unseen irony is that the one percent of the one percent who own social media sites are saying “Ka-ching!” while many users are thinking, “Thank goodness for YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, or we would never know about these extraordinary (soon to be forgotten) events.”  Thus, I would argue that on at least a subconscious level, people come to think of a guy like Schmidt as a national leader of sorts.  It reminds me of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which the 19th Century man with his technological prowess is to be given a title that doesn’t quite acknowledge that he’s the most powerful person in the realm.  Arthur remains The King, Merlin remains The Wizard, and the technologically skilled Yankee is given the title The Boss.